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Who were those guys on MorningJoe today—two Feinstein staffers? Nope, they were Mark Halperin and Jeremy Peters, making like Dem aides in defending the report on the CIA that Dem Senator Diane Feinstein released yesterday.

Halperin, head of Bloomberg Politics, had the chutzpah to claim that the report was not "political." Peters of the New York Times then chimed in to say that in releasing the report, the Senate conducted itself in a "very sober" way.

During an exclusive interview with former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden on Tuesday’s NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams felt that it was worth creating a moral equivalency by asking Hayden to explain “how” the United States is “better than our enemies morally” following the release of a report about the CIA’s use of “torture” following the attacks on September 11, 2001. Minutes later, Williams also attempted to bait Hayden into condemning the CIA and its actions by proposing a scenario where, “god forbid, members of your family, had to undergo some of the treatments we are reading about in this report.”

On Tuesday night, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley did little to hide his liberal bias when it came to supporting the release of the report by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee detailing the use of “torture” by the agency on terrorists following the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

In addition to asking CBS News contributor and former acting CIA Director Mike Morell if he felt “ashamed” after the release of the report Tuesday, the program aired over two minutes of a 2007 interview Pelley conducted for 60 Minutes in which he clashed with former CIA Director George Tenet on the subject of enhanced interrogation methods.

On the December 9 edition of his Hardball program, host Chris Matthews suggested that former Vice President Dick Cheney is a masochist who should not be trusted with the call about when to deploy potentially torturous enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorist detainees.

On Tuesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and the Democratically controlled Senate Intelligence Committee released a controversial report detailing the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program used against suspected terrorists in the years after 9/11.

The report has drawn criticism from Republicans and many in the intelligence community but on ABC’s The View, co-host Whoopi Goldberg offered up a bizarre reason for opposing it’s release. Goldberg argued “I don't mind that it comes out. I don’t think right now during the holidays when parents are not paying attention at the malls and kids are running around because they're out of school.”

On Monday night, ABC News continued to report on the impending release of a report on the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation methods as though partisanship had no role when, in fact, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are the very reason it was compiled and will be released.Following a morning in which ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Todaymade no mention of the political reasoning, ABC kept the streak going on World News Tonight with David Muir with another report from ABC News chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz.

During an NBC News special report on President Obama nominating Pentagon official Ashton Carter be the next secretary of defense, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd advanced White House talking points that the President really wanted someone who would challenge the administration on foreign policy: "...they claim they want him to be more confrontational with the White House national security team....I have aides tell me they want Ashton Carter to be a bull in a china shop if necessary and be that person."

The Esquire pundit claims that “every militarized halftime show, every Concert for Valor, every local television anchor wearing a flag pin or a yellow ribbon, is testimony to how the Pentagon has transformed the country from a skeptical republic to a sentimental beer commercial.”

It looks like the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, is choosing to become an active participant in the covering for the failure by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to carry out his most basic duty as the state's chief executive in a timely fashion.

The AP's unbylined three-paragraph report published at 2:12 PM ET this afternoon acts as if the Guard had a meaningful presence in Ferguson last night. It didn't. It also describes the looters, thugs and miscreants who ran wild last night as "protesters" and "demonstrators."

The New York Times continued its annoying, Winston Smith-like habit of rewriting history in virtually real time yesterday.

Helene Cooper's original Monday afternoon report on Chuck Hagel's sacking as Secretary of Defense is no longer available at the Times. However, since I anticipated that the paper would conduct a comprehensive cleanup yesterday when I posted on the paper's original coverage, it is available here at my web host for fair use and discussion purposes. Cooper's Tuesday Page 1 print edition replacement is starkly different from her original effort. Side-by-side comparisons of certain sections follow the jump.

They were characterizing Miklaszewski's description of the Obama administration's "micromanagement" of the Department of Defense in which communication flows only in one direction: from the White House to the Pentagon. On today's Morning Joe, NBC's Pentagon correspondent reported that former SecDefs Robert Gates and Leon Panetta had recently "lambaste[d]" that micromanagement.

As is the case with so many executive changes in both the public and the private sector, there is vagueness in the circumstances surrounding the end of Chuck Hagel's stint as Obama administration Secretary of Defense.

While it's not unusual for an exec to be asked to resign to avoid being formally fired, which was apparently the case with Hagel, the higher-ups involved are usually smart enough to pay tribute to the departed official and move on without letting contrary information get out. Apparently not this White House, and not the New York Times — unless their joint mission is to subtly discredit Hagel. The contradictions in today's report by Helene Cooper (saved here for future reference and fair use purposes) seem too obvious to be accidental (bolds are mine):

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